“Got it,” Boatman called a moment later.
Still kneeling, McCready took a twig from the ground and used it to lift the shell from the clay. Angling it to catch the light, he peered closely at the marks in the base. “Remington. Nine millimeter.” A paper evidence bag materialized beside his knee, held open by one of the agents; McCready dropped the case into it, and the agent sealed and labeled it, then set it in one of the plastic bins.
He sat back on his heels. “All right. We’re burning daylight, so let’s get to it. Boatman, you and Kimball keep mapping. The rest of you, dig in: shovel till you see something, then switch to trowels. Screen everything — dirt, leaves, twigs, everything but the air. Hell, screen the air, too.” He waved a hand in a sweeping gesture that encompassed not just the mound of clay but the surrounding area as well. “Might be more brass, buried or scattered around the periphery. Maybe cigarette butts, too, if we’re lucky or the shooters are stupid. Maybe they left us some DNA.”
“Maybe a signed confession, too,” joked one of the agents. McCready did not laugh, so no one else did, either.
“All right,” he said. “Dig in. Easy does it, though. If our C.I.’s playing straight with us, we’ve got three bodies here — the two buyers and our undercover guy. Way the C.I. tells it, the traffickers never intended to sell; their plan all along was to kill the buyers, keep the coke, and move their own distributors into the dead guys’ turf.”
“Nice folks,” muttered someone.
“Aren’t they all?” someone else responded.
They began by defining the margins of the grave with probes — thin, four-foot rods of stainless steel, each topped by a one-foot horizontal handle. Pressed into the soft earth of a fresh grave, the slender shafts sank easily; encountering hard, undisturbed soil, though, they balked and bowed, resisting. The probes weren’t actually necessary; the perimeter of the grave was clearly visible, once the leaves and the slight mound of excess fill dirt had been removed. Still, the Bureau prided itself on thoroughness, and McCready was a Bureau man all the way. There would be no shortcuts today, for himself or his team.
Once the grave’s outline was flagged and mapped and photographed, three of the agents — already sweating inside their biohazard suits — began digging. They started with shovels, working at the margins, digging down a foot all the way around before nibbling their way toward the carnage they expected to unearth at the center. After a grim twenty minutes, marked mainly by labored breathing and the rasping and ringing of shovel blades against soil and rocks, one of the agents — Starnes, a young woman whose blond hair spilled from the hood of her moonsuit like a saint’s nimbus — paused and leaned in for a closer look. “Sir? I see fabric. Looks like maybe a shirtsleeve.”
McCready knelt beside her. With the triangular tip of a thin trowel, he flicked away crumbs of clay. “Yeah. It’s an arm. Lose the shovels. Switch to trowels. Let’s pedestal the remains.”
Two sweaty hours later, digging downward and inward from all sides, they’d uncovered a tangle of limbs, torsos, and heads. The pedestaled assemblage resembled a macabre sculpture — a postmortem wrestling match, or a pile of tacklers on a football field. It also reminded McCready, for some odd reason, of an ancient Roman statue he’d seen years before, in the Vatican Museums: a powerful sculpture of a muscular man and his two terrified sons caught in the crushing coils of sea serpents. Maybe the reason wasn’t so odd after all, he realized: like the chilling figures frozen in stone, these three men had died in the coils of something sinister, something that had slithered up behind them as surely and fatally as any mythological monster.
McCready photographed the entwined bodies from every angle, seemingly oblivious to the stench that grew steadily stronger as the day — and the corpses — got hotter. “All right,” he said finally. “Give me three body bags over on this patch of grass. Let’s lift them out one at a time. I’ll want pictures after each one.”
It took another half hour to lay out the corpses, faceup, on the open body bags. By then, several of the techs were looking green around the gills, though no one had vomited. The last of the bodies to be lifted from the grave — the eyes gone to mush, the cheeks puffed out — was recognizable, just barely, as the man whose photograph McCready had passed around in the morning’s briefing. “This one’s Haskell, our undercover guy,” he said grimly.
“So the C.I. was telling us true,” said Kimball. “The drug buy goes bad, turns into a shoot-out.”
“Looks like it,” said McCready. “But just to be sure, let’s ask him.” He turned, looking over one shoulder toward the trees on the far side of the clearing. “Hey,” he called out. “You — Brockton. Step out from behind that tree. And keep your hands where I can see them.”
The team turned as a man emerged. He did not appear to be a seedy specimen from the sewers of the drug-trafficking world. The man looked more bookish than dangerous, and as he raised his hands, a broad smile creased his face.
Chapter 1
“You—Brockton,” I heard McCready calling. “Step out from behind that tree. And keep your hands where I can see them.”
“I’m unarmed,” I yelled, stepping from my observation post behind an oak tree. “But I’ve got a Ph.D., and I’m not afraid to use it. One wrong move, and I’ll lecture you to death!” The joke—mostly a joke — drew laughs from the weary FBI agents, as I’d hoped it would. “I’m Dr. Bill Brockton,” I added as I approached. “Welcome to the Body Farm.” I approached the rim of the empty grave, which was ringed with evidence flags and sweat-drenched FBI forensic techs. Peering into the hole, I saw that they had excavated all the way down to undisturbed soil, four feet down. The clay there was deeply grooved, as if it had been clawed by an immense monster. I, in fact, was that monster, and I’d left those marks the day before, when I’d dug the grave with a backhoe.
I’d missed most of today’s excavation, having spent the morning entombed deep inside Neyland Stadium, the colossal cathedral to college football that the University of Tennessee had erected beside the emerald waters of the Tennessee River. Wedged beneath the stadium’s grandstands, caught in a spiderwork of steel girders, was Stadium Halclass="underline" a dingy string of offices, classrooms, and laboratories, most of them assigned to the Anthropology Department, which I chaired. The rooms were strung along one side of a curving, quarter-mile corridor, one that underscored the hall in Stadium Hall. At midafternoon, when McCready had texted to say that the training exercise was nearly finished, I’d hopped into my truck, crossed the bridge, and slipped through a high wooden gate and down through the woods, stepping carefully to avoid treading on the bodies and bones scattered throughout the three-acre site: donated corpses whose postmortem careers were meticulously scrutinized, itemized, and immortalized, in photos, journal articles, scholarly dissertations, and law-enforcement anecdotes.
Officially, my macabre laboratory was named the Anthropology Research Facility, but a few years before, one of McCready’s waggish FBI colleagues had dubbed it “the Body Farm,” and the moniker — popularized by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell — had caught on so thoroughly that even I, the facility’s creator, tended to call it by the catchy nickname. For several years now, the FBI had been sending Evidence Response Team members to the Body Farm for training exercises like this one. With a ready supply of actual human corpses, plus plenty of privacy, the facility was the only place in the nation — possibly in the entire world — where forensic teams could hone their skills in such realistic scenarios.